Nobody's Slave (8 page)

‘What is it, Joseph? This is no time to ...’

But the man slumped forward, quite suddenly, flat on his face in the dust, the feathered shaft of an arrow sunk between his shoulders, like a giant bee sting.

Then another man fell, and another. There were arrows everywhere, and men running this way and that to avoid them. The arrows were silent, almost invisible, as they flew through the air. No-one could see where they came from. There was just the sudden soft chunk! and the sight of an arrow sprouting from someone's arm or leg or back or the thatch of a hut.

Tom ducked into a doorway and looked out. One sailor lay still in the dust, and two others were crawling desperately for shelter. The rest were ducking, hiding like himself, looking to see where the arrows came from, calling out to each other.

‘By the gate!’

‘No, there - by the third hut!’

‘Behind you - they'm creeping up!’

A pistol shot; then another - and the strong clear call of Admiral Hawkins. ‘To me! Men of the
Jesus
, take the south gate! Francis, you take the other! We'll trap them in!’

Tom ran out of the hut after the Admiral in a confused rush towards the gate in the thorn hedge where they had come in. He saw two Africans - three - hurry through the gate before them, away among the low trees. One turned to face them, quite still for a long, fleeting instant as he lifted his bow. Tom saw the black skin striped with bold white and red paint, the face a fierce mask, the proud lift of the shoulders - then the arrow was loosed, and even as Tom fired his second pistol the man was gone.

The arrow grazed the Admiral on the neck - a little to the left, and it would have been through his throat. Tom and the bosun offered him help, but he pushed them roughly aside.

‘It’s nothing - leave it now! Shut me this gate! Come on, sirs, heave! Now, watch both ways. You lad - stand there! There may be some more still within the village.’

Tom stared back towards the village. But no more attackers appeared from the huts. Simon stood beside him, his cutlass held manfully before his face to ward off danger. There was a smile on his face that angered Tom. He was sure it was only a bluff.

‘Don't be afraid, Si. Stay close to me - I'll look out for you.’

‘I'm not afraid!’ said Simon indignantly. ‘I'm glad! 'Tis a fine hunt, this!’

‘Oh aye; except they've set a trap for
us
,’ Tom answered irritably. ‘I never knew a deer or fox do that.’

‘That's just it, don’t you see? At least it shows they’re not animals! We shan't catch ’em without a fight!' Simon laughed, his face happy, almost radiant. Tom could not understand it - perhaps Simon was mazed.

Shouts, shots, and cheers came from the other village gate, where Francis’s men were.

‘Sounds like they've caught some there, anyway,’ he said. ‘Though we'll have a job to get them to the boats.’

But return to the boats was what they had to do. Francis's party had indeed caught two men - tall, proud warriors with painted, mask-like faces, who stared down at their captors disdainfully. Somehow they had to get these prisoners back to the boats, as well as the injured sailors. There were four walking wounded, including the Admiral, and two who had to be carried. Quickly, they made litters made from the beams and thatch of the village huts. Then they set out. 

The arrows began again as soon as they were out of the village. It was as though the forest itself was fighting them. They saw no enemy at all; just a sudden curse, or cry of pain, and another sailor staggering, clutching the shaft of an arrow sunk in his arm or chest; and the quiet rustle of someone hurrying away in the woods. The sailors hurried on, sweating, afraid, while the mocking chatter of monkeys and parrots echoed weirdly around them, and their own breath rasped in their lungs.

Tom wished he had made Simon stay at the boats, and felt sick with guilt at having led him into danger. But every time he looked at Simon, there was a silly, brave grin on his strange young cousin's face, as though he were enjoying himself in some way; and Tom felt an unusual, irritated admiration.

Suddenly they stopped, stunned by the sound of drums throbbing menacingly ahead of them. This time it was less like a message. There were several drums beating together, throbbing louder and louder to a crescendo of sound which numbed them. The sailors stared at each other, awed, unable to think. Then the drums stopped, and the sudden silence was pierced by a scream, then a chorus of bloodthirsty yells and a scattered volley of shots from the direction of the beach ahead.

‘They're attacking the boats! Make haste there, or we'll be stranded!’ Admiral Hawkins leapt into life, hurrying ahead with the men who could still run. Tom was dragging Simon along, and the others about him were running too, pushing the reluctant African prisoners, giving a hand to those carrying the litters. But a gap began to open between them and those in front, and Tom saw more than one man about him glance anxiously over his shoulder.

An arrow hummed past his ear, dropping a man in his tracks. Tom bent to help him, but he was dead already. He heard a whoop to his left, and another further ahead. Despite the suffocating heat, Tom felt a chill between his shoulder blades, and the truth froze him like a winter's wind. It was they, not the Africans, who were being hunted now!

His feet moved slower and his breath came harsher, but still he ran. Then suddenly, there it was - the end of the path, and in the dazzling sunlight on the little beach, a melee of men, struggling, yelling, fighting for their lives. Tom ducked into the melee, glancing desperately about him to find the quickest way to drag Simon to the pinnace. He saw a tall African, painted all over in fierce patterns of red and white, plunge his spear into a sailor's side as he lifted his arm to strike; saw John Hawkins lunge again and again with his rapier; saw a sailor, struggling futilely in his own net while an African pierced him with a spear; saw John Sanders the bosun knocking one of the black men out of a boat with an oar; saw Francis, cutting with his sword at an African's spear.

Tom saw all these things, but there was one thing he missed. He did not see the lanky, sharp-eyed black warrior, standing cunningly by a tree on the edge of the conflict. The man lifted his bow again and again, each time a sailor stood clear for a second from the fierce mass of fighting Africans. Each time he fired, a sailor screamed, or spun round in agony.

Simon saw him. Just as they were about to climb into the pinnace he yelled, and pushed Tom back, so that Tom stumbled and fell, with his cousin collapsing on top of him.

For a moment Tom’s head was underwater, but he wrenched himself up, spluttering, cursing Simon for holding him down, and tried to shove him away. But Simon's body was strangely heavy, and rigid - twitching as though he had the palsy. He pushed Simon off him, and felt his wet hair crawl on his scalp as he saw what had happened.

An arrow had gone clean through Simon's neck, so that the feather stuck out one side, and the barb the other. His young cousin’s neck was arched, trembling, the unconscious muscles trying to force the arrow out; but it was useless - an artery was pierced, and Simon's life's blood was already pulsing out, staining the sand and water by the bows of the pinnace.

After a minute or so Simon opened his eyes. He saw Tom, and tried to speak; but just then a rush of sailors clambered on board, trampling over them both in their hurry, and Simon fell unconscious again from loss of blood. Tom cradled him in his arms, ignoring the hubbub all round. He called his name frantically, and tried to staunch the ceaseless flow of blood with his shirt, but it was no use. Simon was dead before the first boat was launched.

‘...
A
ND THUS we do consign them to the deep.’

The Admiral's strong, mellow voice fell silent. He looked up from the prayer book, and nodded to Master Barrett.

‘Heave 'em over, then, lads. Steady does it. One at a time.’

The two men who stood at either end of the first of the nine long bundles of sailcloth bent, lifted their burden, and with one easy movement swung it out over the rail. There was a splash, the men stood back, and the next bundle was lifted.

Tom stood fourth in the line, at the end of the shortest bundle. His feet were a few inches from the bulge of Simon's head, and the other round bulge next to it, which was one of the cannonballs sewn into the shroud to take the body to the bottom. The sailor at the other end of the shroud was no special friend of Simon, but then he had had few friends on board. Only his cousin Francis, who was busy with his own burials on the
Judith
, and Tom, whose life he had saved with his own.

The third splash lifted a few drops of spray onto the hot deck, and it was Simon's turn. Tom and the young sailor bent, and as they lifted, Tom thought how strangely stiff the shroud was, as though it contained a beam of wood instead of a body. As they swung it over the rail Tom almost forgot to let go, so that the bundle swung with its head inward towards the ship as it fell. I cannot even bury my cousin properly, he thought.  I promised his father to take care of him, and this is what happens. He stepped back out of the way, staring dully out over the glittering, emerald sea.

As soon as the last body was over, the Jesus' orchestra struck up a hymn, and the deep voices of the sailors joined in with the gentlemen's lutes and viols. Tom tried to sing too, but found he could not; instead he wept, as several other sailors did for their friends, glad of the hymn to cover the sound. Simon had irritated him nearly every day with his fears and frailty and smugness; but he had been his cousin for all that, whom he had known since childhood. And there had been nothing frail about the way he had died. Tom remembered Simon’s mocking laughter when they had been attacked, and the light of adventure in his eyes, when others had panicked. Then at the last it had been Simon who had seen the archer, and pushed Tom down to save him. Simon had died saving Tom’s life.

He saw splashes at the side of the
Minion
too, and the
William and John
, and even the little
Judith
. All the ships’ crews had suffered. He saw the fin of a shark cruising in from the sea, and hoped the current of the river would bring his cousin's body quickly under the mud.

All the boats had returned from the raid, but few slaves had been captured; and the casualties, already heavy, soon became worse. Over the next few days, as the fleet crept south, several more men died. Always it was the same way - a man who had been wounded by an arrow developed a raging fever, a ferocious thirst, and then became paralysed, so that his jaw was locked tight and could only be held open by inserting a stout piece of wood or a spoon between his teeth. Clearly the arrows had been poisoned. They feared for the Admiral, who had been hit in the neck; but his scratch must have been lighter than the others’, or the surgeon's care for him better, for he survived when others died.

They looked for easier targets, creeping into estuaries and inlets, sending surprise parties ashore when they saw a village, but they had little luck. Sometimes they met Portuguese ships from whom they could buy or steal a few slaves, but never enough. At night they heard the drums talking among the dark trees to their left, telling of the approach of the fleet, and in the morning the Africans who might have been there were gone. Tom volunteered to go ashore on these raids as often as he could. He took a fierce vengeful joy in herding the few bound, terrified captives into the boats, or burning the abandoned villages. And several times a day he found some excuse to go below to the hold, and gloat over the slowly increasing mass of black figures chained there, as though their imprisonment could somehow atone for Simon's death.

But the hold was still half-empty after a month; there were only about 150 slaves in the whole fleet. The Admiral began to frown, and lose his usual good humour; and they sailed a hundred miles further south, to try to escape the damaging rumours the drums were spreading. Then, when they anchored in a large bay one afternoon, it seemed their luck had finally begun to turn.

Tom was on the quarter-deck, reeving a new rope to the mizzen shrouds when a gun fired from the
Minion
, which was anchored further inshore. He looked up, and saw the lookout in the
Minion's
maintop waving to attract their attention and pointing eagerly inshore.

At first they saw nothing; then a canoe shot out from at the mouth of the river. In it were four African warriors, paddling straight towards the fleet. They balanced the narrow little craft expertly as it came out of the sheltered water of the river and began to lift to the rock and sway of the ocean waves.

‘So.’ Master Barrett chuckled, laughter rumbling deep in his barrel chest. ‘Do they come to join us now of their own free will, and ask for a passage to the Americas?’ Once or twice already, small boats had come out to them to sell unwanted prisoners, but this canoe clearly had no room for passengers.

Two more canoes appeared, larger than the first - then five - and then it was a whole fleet, thirty or forty canoes, bobbing and dancing on the waves. They spread out as they headed for the ships, and Tom saw that in the centre there was one much larger than the rest, with a dozen paddlers kneeling side by side. It was almost as large as one of the smaller pinnaces. The paddlers in the other canoes seemed to be watching this one, taking their orders from it; and as it came closer, Tom saw a man in the stern on a slightly raised seat like a king, proudly surveying the progress of the others.

‘Do they mean to attack?’ cried Master Barrett, amazed, less amused than before. ‘The insolent wretches! Jump to it, all hands! Run out the guns, man the sides to repel boarders!’

The crew leapt into action, dashing hither and thither to take up the stations they had practised for fighting other ships. Tom's place was by the small, lethal swivel gun on the poop. Quickly he ran up from the powder room with the little barrel of gunpowder, and put it in a thick oaken box with its lid shut for safety on deck. Andrew Baines, the gunner, lit his slow-match, unlashed the gun from its fastenings, and swabbed out the barrel. Then they loaded it with grapeshot: a liberal selection of nails, bolts, links of broken chain and pipe with which they could slaughter a dozen men at a time, should they wish. They depressed the muzzle as far as they could over the side, aiming at the largest canoe, and waited, glancing at the Admiral for their orders.